“But people who have access to those photos and are inclined to disseminate them have to ask themselves, who benefits? Is this going to enlighten us or offer any solutions, or is it just horrible?” “If the families say ‘I think we should show this,’ I think we should listen to them,” said Emily Bernard, an author and professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Photos of Sandy Hook victims are now accessible only by their families.

They lobbied the Connecticut government for strict legislation barring access to materials related to the victims. Moore, who had written, produced and directed the 2002 documentary, “Bowling for Columbine,” about the 1999 Colorado high school shooting, intended to seek photos of their children through public records requests. The Sandy Hook families mistakenly thought that Mr. Noah hid with 15 classmates in the classroom bathroom, a 4½ by 3½-foot space into which the gunman fired more than 80 rounds from a Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle, killing all but one child.Īfter Sandy Hook, Connecticut passed some of the most stringent gun safety measures in the nation.īut there was a different outcome around the same time, when the filmmaker Michael Moore proposed the release of crime scene photos by the Sandy Hook victims’ relatives as a way to spur political action. 14, 2012, shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which killed 20 first graders and six educators. Noah Pozner was among the first children buried after the Dec. Media outlets had no access to images of the shooting’s aftermath, so decisions about whether to publish graphic images from this situation are moot. Press photographers were only able to capture what was visible outside the school, including the images made by Pete Luna from the Uvalde Leader News, who witnessed children fleeing a classroom after climbing through a window. In the case of the Uvalde shooting, photojournalists were not allowed on the grounds of the school, and law enforcement did not release any images from the crime scene. “We don’t want to withhold images that would help people to understand what has happened in scenarios like these, but we also don’t publish images sheerly as provocation.” “We’re always trying to balance the news value of an image and its service to our readers against whether or not the image is dignified for the victims or considerate toward the families or loved ones of those pictured,” said Meaghan Looram, the director of photography at The New York Times. Mainstream news organizations sometimes show disturbing images of people who have died to illustrate the horrors of an event, like the photograph by Lynsey Addario of a mother, two children and a family friend killed in March in Irpin, Ukraine, or the image of a three-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015. “What makes this a challenging ethics call is that when you’re a photo editor, you never really do know which is the photograph that is going to seem exploitative, and what image will touch the conscience of people and move the needle on the debate.” “It is true that shocking photos of suffering occasionally do make an imprint,” said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of Columbia University’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, citing the photographer Nick Ut’s famous photo of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack in 1972. But the potential use of these images to end official inertia after mass shootings presents new, wrenching considerations for victims’ families - many of whom adamantly reject such an idea. They prompt public outcry and, sometimes, lead to change. Grief and anger over two horrific mass shootings in Texas and New York only ten days apart has stirred an old debate: Would disseminating graphic images of the results of gun violence jolt the nation’s gridlocked leadership into action?įrom the abolition movement to Black Lives Matter, from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, photographs and film have laid bare the human toll of racism, authoritarianism and ruinous foreign policy. His first thought: “It would move some people, change some minds.” WASHINGTON - After Lenny Pozner’s six-year-old son Noah died at Sandy Hook, he briefly contemplated showing the world the damage an AR-15-style rifle did to his child.

Crime scene photos